


getting up

by thinkbucket



Series: can't let go when you still need saving [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, angsty, but with a happy ending?, character study i suppose, mostly about yennefer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:27:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23244754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinkbucket/pseuds/thinkbucket
Summary: In a way, each time it happens, it gets a little bit easier, because she’s had practice at putting it all back. She’s learned what works, what doesn’t, she knows more about what she needs, and how to heal the fastest and the easiest. It becomes second nature, an unconscious sort of art form.
Series: can't let go when you still need saving [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1673863
Comments: 7
Kudos: 57





	getting up

It comes in waves. There are sometimes when it’s calm, it’s quiet, it’s almost _serene_. And Yennefer just feels like a person, she feels alright, like she was never incomplete, like she was enough, like she _is_ enough. She’s strong, but not too strong, just the right amount of weakness to feel her humanity.

And then there are times that weakness is overbearing, it’s all consuming, where she comes apart from the inside. Pieces of her start spilling out, parts so deep and so dark she didn’t even realize that she had, things she’s shoved to the side to address later but later came too soon, and she tries to grab them, to hold them in place while she figures out a way to patch it back together. Yet she always manages to somehow get it, to be mostly whole, better.

In a way, each time it happens, it gets a little bit easier, because she’s had practice at putting it all back. She’s learned what works, what doesn’t, she knows more about what she needs, and how to heal the fastest and the easiest. It becomes second nature, an unconscious sort of art form.

But each time, it also gets harder, because the bones have never fully healed, the angles are a little off, the scars have already left her skin a little rough, the stitches are just yanked open, tearing the skin even more than before. Aches that have dulled but they never left, and the cold reminds her that they’re still there, they’ve never left, just been a little more quiet.

Every time, she misses a piece, but in it’s stead she gains a lesson.

Her father— she was still so young when he died— but she remembers the first realization of loss. She learned that not all things are beautiful, and it was soon after that she realized that most things on the Continent are not beautiful at all. They were like her, ugly, malformed, unnecessary.

Her mother: meant well, but didn’t do well, or not well enough for it to matter. Through her and her failures, Yennefer learnt that good intentions are rarely good enough. Sometimes it’s just better to be straightforwardly selfish, if that’s how it has to be, because there is no sense in trying to make it more palatable. The pill has to be swallowed either way, the effect will be the same.

The villagers, they usually didn’t care enough to really affect her. The few unfortunate interactions she did have with the unlucky taught her fear: fear the unknown, fear the different, fear the ugly. The things that didn’t make sense, that were an abomination, the abnormal, she realized that most shunned them simply because they did not understand. It was not out of an innate dislike, it was protection, a mere defense mechanism. And while it hurt, she understood.

Her step-father was always filled with hatred, and perhaps that’s where she first truly learned the feeling. Sometimes it was not enough to fear what was different from you, sometimes you needed to hate it so you didn’t feel so similar. Hate creates a type of distance, in the way that trying to cross it feels impossible, because the two sides are irreconcilable. Distance makes you safe, removed, impossible to be reached and touched.

The Rectoress taught her humiliation—a burning, enveloping sense of shame and disgust for who and what she was. _Piglet_ , not worthy of a real name, not even worth full price, only another pig in the pen, an eel in the pool, only a conduit and nothing more. She brought her down lower than she thought she could go, having been raised unloved and unwanted, she realized that even if by some miracle someone could look past her disfiguration, she would still never be loved nor wanted. And so she learnt the shame of desiring something one could never, should never even hope to have.

With the young sorcerer, her first lover, she came to understand the true meaning and the far reaching effects of betrayal. To put trust in someone so willingly was to ask to be broken. Laughably, she should have expected him to only act as dishonorably as she. It was a lesson she thought she had already knew, that trust was only for constants, and not for mortals. Foolishly, she had forged ahead, blinded by her emotions, comforted by his care, craving the feeling of being wanted by another, despite knowing it wasn’t real, she’d wanted it, she’d had it, and then she destroyed it with something as simple as trusting someone with too much. How could she expect someone else to handle her fragile, patchwork heart with the amount of care she needed to keep it together?

The King, for all his charm and excellent tastes, was a fool, and if Yennefer learned anything it court, it was that men were more easily swayed by hips than with tongues, and yet they’d sooner listen to another pair of balls than a pair of breasts. People were easy enough to understand and manipulate once you brought them down to their most base desires, but you could only bring them so far within the carnal realm before they refused to go further, for they would rather wallow in wanton pleasure than care about more the more powerful pursuits. Sex can bring pleasure, can tease gold from purses, but it cannot bring peace to war torn lands, cannot feed starving bellies, and it cannot satisfy for very long.

The Witcher, the proud, presumptuous, woebegone mutant, left his parting gift of taking away Yennefer’s free will from her. All the rest, Yennefer had learned how to cope with, how to reassemble the pieces she had been left with when she crumbled down. But now, tied with strings of fate she had never consented to, bound to a man who she probably never truly loved, bereft of her freedom and trapped in a cage that she cannot see, she finally understands the stupidity of her heart. She had always chased after what she thought she could not have, believing that it would finally teach her how to be happy. She may feel constrained because of the man’s wish, but it is herself that has long imposed the restrictions that prevent her, the freedom she lost was nothing she had not already stolen from herself. Yennefer for so long had allowed herself to be told that she was not, could not, would not ever be enough.

Tissaia de Vries stands before Yennefer of Vengerberg and asks her to stand with her, to fight alongside her, as an equal. Yennefer cannot seem to reconcile the woman that pleads with her now with the one that had once told her she would not be loved even if she were beautiful. But as the confusion swirls in her heart, threatening to break her down once more, reopening the hurts, suddenly all the pieces she has clung to come together.

Yennefer’s one defining fear had always been that she could not be loved because she thought she was hideous. Even after her transformation, she let that terrorize her mind, that she would always have to try her hardest and beyond to manipulate people into loving her. If she wanted to be seen and powerful, she would have to accept that because she was not, she had to fight and selfishly take what she wanted, she needed to ostracize, to despise, she needed to demean and degrade others, she would have to trust no one and especially not a man, and only when she had no choice in the matter did she realize that it has always been her choice. The person that Yennefer has for years striven to prove herself to all along was a hunchback girl from Vengerberg.

Tissaia had been trying to teach her self sufficiency, by facing her fears and moving beyond them. What Yennefer thought she had wanted was to be good at something, to succeed and excel and to prove to everyone else that she could. That this hunchback, disfigured, undesirable girl could achieve what was thought to be impossible, and she stupidly thought that would be enough for her.

She was already excellent. She has already proved herself to be a capable sorceress.

And only when she finally accepts that does she realize that Tissaia has long thought so too.

She will accept the invitation. Anyway, what other option does she really have? Fight now or fight later, but there is certainly something satisfying about being asked so desperately, knowing she is needed, _wanted_. She finally gets her wish when she realizes it was useless. Even now, however, some habits are hard to break.

“Have you ever used that word before?”

**Author's Note:**

> question: do my run ons give you all a headache, because it’s my literal thought process so it’s easy for me to write this way and punctuation just kinda changes the feel of that, ya feel


End file.
